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Year 1970


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Hi there.

In this challenge we are moving back to year 1970 - Apollo style.

Challenges are:

- achieve stable, round orbit

- land on Mun/Minmus

- achieve Duna orbit, or Minmus orbit when launching from Mun

Now, the tricky part - you are only allowed to use stock parts, IVA camera, slide rule and stopwatch.

Basically, you have to do maths correctly, navigate by window and inside instruments, time burns/decouples by stopwatch.

I am not sure if this is even possible. Maybe orbital view should be allowed at least for timewarping purposes, but i dont know how to switch of trajectory simluations. Less extreme versions of this challenge may inlcude using 'classic' camera view, calculators (simple calcs or Olex's tool if you dont want to do all maths by yourself).

Idea for this challenge came up to me during discovering awesomeness of orbital mechanics and astrodynamics in general, so it looks a bit geeky. I lack of historical knowledge about 1970s and Apollo missions, so maybe someone could choose more accurate rules.

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to be fair mechjeb is less advanced then the Apollo guidance computer .... and mission control had orbit projections by the 70s

just saying

the guys in the rocket had little to do really other then punch the number in to the computer

assent was fully automated the astronauts had to talk NASA OUT OF making them little more then "man in a can" even in the Mercury days

the LEM had to be flown seat of the pants but that was about it and Apollo 13 had some seat of the pants moments

now THAT could be a good challenge wonder how hard it would be to build a save file for that ....

thing is the "mun" in ksp seems much closer to the planet then the moon is from earth

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All early US/USSR spacecrafts where able to fly without any soul on board, also current Iva view are insufficient for many maneuvers because of very limited visibility (to be honest, front windows in Mk 1-2 are virtually useless now).

Also map view doesn't provide too much orbital informations, so even using Mech-Jeb with scripting capabilities aren't match too much with Apollo capabilities.

To this day, only spacecraft that required crew to fly into space where a space shuttle ;).

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All early US/USSR spacecrafts where able to fly without any soul on board, also current Iva view are insufficient for many maneuvers because of very limited visibility (to be honest, front windows in Mk 1-2 are virtually useless now).

Also map view doesn't provide too much orbital informations, so even using Mech-Jeb with scripting capabilities aren't match too much with Apollo capabilities.

To this day, only spacecraft that required crew to fly into space where a space shuttle ;).

the shuttle COULD be flown by remote if they wanted to the AO talked them out of it and the only part of the shuttle that gets hand flown is final approach to touchdown lol and the last refit be for they where retired added the systems for an automated landing but they where never used lol

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Hmm... I know it's not that realistic a challenge, but I want to try this. I've done the orbit thing already (though I have no screenshots to prove it) but going for the Mun could be a nice challenge. Just a question beforehand: is the map view allowed before take-off? I was thinking I could time-warp to launch window using map view and then do the rest from IVA-view. Because of the radar altimeter I think landing is actually easier from this view than from the standard view.

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the LEM had to be flown seat of the pants but that was about it and Apollo 13 had some seat of the pants moments

I recently ran across a 1970 academic paper describing what "manual mode" actually meant in the LEM. Even in Armstrong's famous manual landing, the LEM had radar-based SMARTASS-type automation. If I remember the paper correctly, it even outdid MechJeb by having a "stop horizontal motion" button. AFAIK the LEM burns during Apollo 13 were totally manual.

Then I dug a little further, and NASA apparently concluded full manual control of LEM simply wasn't possible with the required safety margin. Astronauts crashed the manual Lunar Lander Research Vehicles in training, and the followup Lunar Lander Test Vehicle was semi-manual, like the LEM. Analog electronics read astronaut's joystick inputs combined with the craft's current attitude and rates-of-turn to judge what the astronaut wanted, then a rate-control autopilot actually ran the thrusters and gimbals to accomplish those wishes. Even then, it was supposedly crazy-difficult to handle, just no longer impossible.

Here's the paper, if anyone's interested: http://www.princeton.edu/~stengel/LM.pdf

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Thanks for info, guys. So it turns out, that this isn't "keep it real" challenge, but more like "make it harder". Well, maybe a situation, when system failure/malfunction occured.

Martsch, do as you please. These rules are not to be taken strictly, they're more like ideas, main goal is to have fun. :]

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